Memories
by Lunalelle
Summary: She has memories, just not her own.


**Title:** Memories  
**Author:** Lunalelle  
**Rating:** PG  
**Word count:** 1014 words  
**Pairing:** Magneto/Rogue, movie!verse  
**Summary:** _She has memories, just not her own._  
**Notes:** I have time to kill, so drabble time. And I like Sarah MacLachlan's "Possession." Post X2.

Rogue looks at the ceiling - cottage cheese plaster, the cheap ceilings that never look good and always look interesting. There were bits of reflective stuff meant to look like stars, and Rogue sometimes counted them when her head started spinning like this.

It was strange, she had five men in her head now, and she'd think that the restless one would be Logan, maybe even Pyro, with his jittery hands. She expected Bobby to stay quiet, and she'd never heard from that first boy - there was just the kiss that cropped up in her dreams sometimes. But while Pyro could be chatty and Logan seemed to stretch under her skin like a great big cat, occasionally making her snap, Magneto was the one who whispered in her ear. Magneto was the one whose mind seemed to overlap her own, doubling her consciousness in such a way that she wasn't quite sure which was hers. She could never explain this to Xavier - she wasn't great with words - and Magneto, who was, always stayed uncharacteristically quiet around him.

It was these times, these nights when she couldn't go to sleep and she listened to Jubilee talk to herself at the other end of the room, that she traced a path on the ceiling with her eyes, and she saw what Magneto wanted her to see. Waking dreams, except she knew they were memories.

They did not make her pity him, they did not make her agree with him, but they made her understand.

_He was young and on his own, but he wasn't like Rogue. He was not a wanderer, and he liked some place to set his feet, which made deportment all the more painful. Ripped from his garden, ripped from his town, ripped from his country, then ripped from his family, into a place that smelled like smoke and piss and beans. All he had was this new power, which was new too; it, too, ripped him away, away from all things normal, all things comfortable. But it was something._

Rogue almost felt that she had a place to put her feet here at the mansion, a place where she was welcomed and where no one told her that she was something strange. But that did not stop her from knowing that she wasn't like a lot of the others in the school - unlike them, she could not connect, she had to be so careful, but she couldn't learn how to control her power like they could. She would always be a danger. Her gloves were on the table, but her pajamas were long to the knuckle and over her feet. She couldn't play with her power. No matter what anyone tried to tell her, it would always be a point of shame. She envied Magneto for being in a place where he felt lost, but having his mutation to cling to, while she had a place that loved her, but she could never love herself.

_He recognized himself as a freak in the eyes of those men - the Jew with something else wrong with him what was it some sort of retard - and he knew that they feared him. That's why they beat him more than the others his age. They eventually learned to beat him with wooden switches and clubs rather than their night sticks or the butts of their guns. He couldn't do what he did at the gate again - he thought it might have been desperation that he could not muster again, not when they beat him every day. But they feared him. And that was good. They didn't know what they feared. After all, what he was did not have a name._

Rogue, on the other hand, heard _mutant_ in her head all the time with an undertone of _freak_, even though people came to the conclusion of _freak_ before _mutant_. These days it was a logical conclusion. It was not the same experience Magneto had. He was alone in his mutation - there were so few mutants as old as Xavier and Magneto. They had a name to fear, now. And Rogue knew that she could be put on the same plane as Mystique and Magneto, even if her poison was not intentional. They could fear Xavier, but they would really have no reason. Xavier was passive, remarkably so, although Rogue thought that someone with that kind of power would have to either have a great deal of self-control or a great deal of megalomania. She was glad he was the way he was, though. That way he could understand like she understood Magneto. Even if he could never know.

_He broke out of the camp. Untermensch was on their lips rather than gew, although it had a different significance to them, and he believed it to be a compliment now. Freak, he thought. He could get used to that if it could get him out, and it made him far more than inferior. How strange that they should call him the very thing that they were afraid they were when he had them cowering under the beds of the children they made shake. They gunned down a few of the prisoners who followed him through the fence he ripped open, but their bullets could do nothing to him now. He had been practicing for over a year, and he felt metal all around him. They were living in a silver age._

She continued to stare at the ceiling, listening to Magneto whisper. Her legs bent so that she could tuck her hands around her thighs. All these minds, all these voices. Her power could never be a blessing. That is why she could never do what Magneto tried to make her do. She could never join him. Her body was simply a weapon with too high a price. And maybe her reasons were selfish. But they were good anyway. So Magneto's voice could only ever be whisper during the nights she stared at the ceiling and waited for him.


End file.
